Advances in semiconductor products are continually requiring smaller and faster devices. Smaller device size allows more functions to be integrated into a single device. Faster devices result in higher throughput for a given system. Unfortunately, these goals are often mutually exclusive given standard circuit designs.
Sense amplifiers are devices particularly driven by technology to smaller and faster implementations. Sense amplifiers detect small voltage differences between two input signals and generate an output representative of which of the two inputs is greater. Sense amplifiers are widely used in memory systems to determine what logic level a memory cell represents given the two output voltages from the cell. Sense amplifiers are also difficult to design both smaller and faster. Faster sense amplifiers may be designed with an associated latch to increase the speed of combination of the latch and amplifier. The combination circuit, however, requires additional layout space. Conversely, small sense amplifiers typically do not meet very high speed performance criteria.